QA – Low hanging fruit in the quest for efficiency

How to QA

Low hanging fruit in the quest for efficiency

What?

A tailor made concept for improvement of QA practices that allows clients to reap the full benefits of best in class practices.

Hunting for bugs? Too late! Proper QA is not about the hunt for bugs; it’s an integral and critical part of product development. Done properly, it starts with requirements verification and doesn’t end. Good QA introduces critical skills and experience to the process of software development to vouchsafe improving standards.

Why?

QA has the potential to save time, mistakes, reputation and frustration. In other words: a whole lot of money. Intelligent use of QA brings a rapid return on investment by allowing better control of technical debt. Suboptimal processes create technical debt. Like all debt, this has to be paid back. The later the payment is made, the more expensive it is. The costs of suboptimal processes start immediately and have a disappointingly long life; sometimes infinite.

And what about ‘teamspirit?’ Working in a team that is ahead of the curve and has a handle on the critical aspects of production increases retention, employee satisfaction and thereby productivity.

How?

An audit of existing processes to highlight areas needing improvement, resulting in a detailed, doable road map to address issues. Typically this will entail a site visit and a structured consultative dialog with key stakeholders. It is absolutely feasible to conduct this remotely. Follow up is usually a curated process of change management with on-going status monitoring to catch and remedy deviations.

Conclusion

Paradoxical though it may sound, the goal is not to eliminate bugs. This is not an option. The goal is to create a durable system: one that will produce the highest possible quality of coding on a daily basis, and work relentlessly on improving this. This is what good QA is for. The more deliberate your decisions during the process, the higher the likelihood that deployed coding will correspond to requirements. This is Quality.

To quote a client:

“We did not realize that a QA (Quality Assurance) could become a link throughout the entire development process. Our Ukrainian team lead gave us this input. We followed his recommendation and added a QA to the team, which we have not regretted for one second. A QA is not just a tester, but is involved from the beginning of the development process. The developers often think about how the solution can be coded, whereas the QA asks the important and relevant product-related questions. Our QA is also interested in usability and design, so she coordinates the communication and all material to the designer. It is our way of ensuring the quality from the beginning of the project.”